Intergenerational money and time transfers by gender in Spain: Who are the actual dependents?

Abstract

1. IntroductionThe analysis of intergenerational transfers has contributed to the understanding of the interaction between population age structure and welfare. This topic has been studied for a long time (Willis 1988; Lee, Parish, and Willis 1994; Albertini, Kolhi, and Vogel 2008), but the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) project (Lee and Mason 2011) takes a comprehensive description of age reallocations, including both public and private transfers and asset-based reallocations, building a generational economy account, consistent with National Accounts. Recently, following the methodology developed by Donehower (2014), non-market activities have been included in the original NTA framework (Donehower and Mejia-Guevara 2012; Zagheni and Zannella 2013; Kluge 2014; Hammer, Prskawetz, and Freund 2015; Zannella 2014; Gal, Szaboc, and Vargha 2015; Jimenez-Fontana 2015). This refers mainly to time devoted to unpaid tasks such as housework or caring for other family members, allowing a thorough analysis of generational economy accounts by gender, which is otherwise misleading. The introduction of gender extends the understanding of how transfers and age reallocation are distributed over the life cycle (Waring 1999), but also makes visible the essential contribution to the welfare system by women, who are the principal providers of care and welfare for children and dependent individuals (Anxo et al. 2007; Esping-Andersen 1999; Ferrera 1996; Giullari and Lewis 2005).Time use literature shows that adult women, especially once they are mothers, spend more time in domestic production than men (Folbre 2004). In Europe this pattern is particularly marked in Mediterranean countries, showing a greater time gap between men and women engaged in housework (Duran 2010). Unsupported familism is a characteristic feature of the Southern European model (Saraceno 1997), implying scarce development of public provision of childcare and long-term care services and insufficient measures supporting work-life balance. Spain is a special case within the southern welfare model as it experienced an increasing and rapid shift towards a dual-earner model until the financial crisis of 2008. Women's employment rate rose from 34.5% in 1992 to 53.8% in 2013. However, having children is strongly related to a decline in female labour income, and this is mainly due to women leaving the labour market rather than temporarily interrupting their activities (Anxo et al. 2007; Naldini and Jurado 2013). Therefore, as observed in economic transfers (see Patxot et al. 2011 for Spain), non-market transfers depend strongly on the exact moment in the life cycle. For example, the number of unpaid hours of housework for women increases sharply after age 30 (Zagheni et al. 2015). Moreover, in a comparative study, Hammer, Prskawetz, and Freund (2015) observe that when summing up paid and unpaid production, only women from Spain (2002) and Slovenia (2000) produce more than men, and in the case of Spain it is due to a much higher contribution of women's housework and household care. This fosters the precarious situation of women as non-market workers in Spain, lacking protection and regulation (Duran 2012).Hence, increasing access to the labour market does not necessarily imply gender equality within the household, unless an effort to balance family care is made through public policies (Lewis 2009). In Spain, welfare and market provision have not substituted women's traditional role as caregivers for children and dependent adults (Duran 2010; Lewis 2009). Therefore, consideration of age and gender when analysing economic transfers is crucial to acknowledge gender differences over the life cycle and to raise concerns about using a concept of economic dependency that only contemplates monetary factors (Brines 1994).In this article we estimate Spanish age profiles of transfers and age reallocations of both market and non-market activities by gender, using NTA and NTTA methodology. …